Saturday, 30 November 2013

Like Saint George’s Day, Saint David’ s Day and Saint Patrick’s, today ought to be a public holiday throughout the United Kingdom.

The next Labour Government will be uniquely well-placed to make that happen by restoring the grounds for such celebration. It is already shaping up to have the feel of Willie Ross, who was Harold Wilson’s only ever Scottish Secretary, and who pursued solidly post-War social democratic measures while, and therefore, giving no quarter whatever either to separatism or to European federalism, as well as trying to ban advertising during television programmes on Sundays, Christmas and Good Friday. On every point, several of the people closest to Ed Miliband more than recall that and other figures the like of whom we had assumed that we should never see again.

The Welfare State, workers’ rights,
full employment, a strong Parliament, trade unions, co-operatives, credit
unions, mutual guarantee societies, mutual building societies, and nationalised
industries, the last often with the word “British” in their names, were historically
successful in creating communities of interest among the several parts of the
United Kingdom, thus
safeguarding and strengthening the Union.

The public stakes in the Bank of
Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland are such permanent,
non-negotiable
safeguards of the Union. Any profits from those stakes ought therefore
to be divided equally among all households in the United Kingdom.

Bevan ridiculed the first
parliamentary Welsh Day on the grounds that “Welsh coal is the same as English
coal and Welsh sheep are the same as English sheep”.

In the 1970s, Labour MPs
successfully opposed Scottish and Welsh devolution not least because of its
ruinous effects on the North of England. Labour activists in the Scottish
Highlands, Islands and Borders, and in North, Mid and West Wales, accurately
predicted that their areas would be balefully neglected under devolution.

Eric
Heffer in England, Tam Dalyell and the Buchans (Norman and Janey) in Scotland,
and Leo Abse and Neil Kinnock in Wales, were prescient as to the Balkanisation
of Britain by means of devolution and the separatism that it was designed to
appease, and as to devolution’s weakening of trade union negotiating power.

Abse, in particular, was prescient as to the rise of a Welsh-speaking oligarchy
based in English-speaking areas, which would use devolution to dominate Welsh
affairs against the interests of Welsh workers South and North, industrial and
agricultural, English-speaking and Welsh-speaking. Heffer’s political base was
in Liverpool, at once very much like the West of Scotland and with close ties
to Welsh-speaking North Wales.

There is a strong feeling among
English, Scottish and Welsh ethnic minorities and Catholics that we no more
want to go down the road of who is or is not “really” English, Scottish or
Welsh than Ulster Protestants want to go down the road of who is or is not
“really” Irish.

The Scotland Office Select Committee is chaired by Ian
Davidson, a Co-operative Party stalwart and Janey Buchan protégé who is
therefore a hammer both of Scottish separatism and of European federalism.

There
is no West Lothian Question, since the Parliament of the United Kingdom
reserves the right to legislate supremely in any policy area for any part of
the country, and the devolution legislation presupposes that it will do so as a
matter of course.

It never, ever need do so and the point would still stand, since what
matters is purely that it has that power in principle, which no one
disputes that it has, or else there would be no perceived need, either
of the SNP, or of a referendum on independence. Anyone who does not like
that ought to have voted No to
devolution. I bet that they did not.

The simplest examination of General Election results at least since
1945 gives the lie to the lazy fantasy that an independent England would have
had, and therefore might have in the future, a permanent or semi-permanent
Conservative Government rather than, as was and would be the case, a Labour
Government almost exactly as often as happened within the United Kingdom,
including with comfortable or landslide majorities on every occasion when that
was the case under the current arrangements.

Those who would counter that that
was and would be seats, not votes, are almost always strong supporters of First
Past The Post, and must face the fact that England would never return a
single-party government under any other electoral system. Great swathes of
England scarcely elect Conservative MPs at all.

The notion that the
Conservative Party has a unique right to speak for England is as fallacious and
offensive as the notion that the Conservative Party has a unique right to speak for the
countryside. But of that, another time.

Scots, it is frequently stated, are progressive
or radical, even left-wing. This, on some readings, gives independence a
radical potential.

Posed slightly differently, independence is deemed necessary
to preserve a welfare state that is cared about here in Scotland but, by
implication, not elsewhere. "We’re different up here" is the
assertion. But who are we different from? And how different are we?

Given much of current debate around independence
is predicated around the idea that there is a gulf in attitude north and south
of the border, this is no small matter. Many will assert that we are seeking a
progressive future through independence to escape the politics of a UK
simultaneously proclaimed to be moving to the right and incapable of
change.

(In such narratives the oft stated enthusiasm of the SNP to keep levels
of corporation tax below those set at Westminster and their intention to grow
the financial sector as a share of the Scottish economy seldom get much of a
hearing.)

If the comparison is between Scotland
(population: five million) and England (53 million), it’s no real surprise to
find some diversity of views. Yet even here, a Nuffield Foundation report in 2011 concluded that in terms
of being "more social democratic in outlook than England, the differences
are modest at best".

In what, perhaps, should serve as a warning for those
who would conflate constitutional and social change they also note that
"like England, Scotland has become less – not more – social democratic since
the start of devolution."

But what if a less disproportionate comparison is
used? A Study for the Red Paper Collective of British Social
Attitudes Surveys going back to the mid-1980s examined not the difference
between Scotland and England but rather between Scotland and our 15 million
closest neighbours, the three northern regions of England.

Looking at a range of measures that might
indicate some level of progressive opinion (e.g. role of government in tackling
unemployment, support for taxation to fund services, attitude to benefit
claimants etc), Scots are no different at all.

It can, of course, be argued
that during much of this timeframe Scotland operated largely within the same
political and economic environment as the three regions sampled, so a degree of
congruity is to be expected. This would be to miss the point. It is not simply
that Scottish opinion was and is the same as these places – it is that Scots
reacted in the same way to the same issues.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, our problems
of unemployment, industrial decline and exploitation are much the same. Yet
many are increasingly content to define Scottish difficulties as being a national
question while issues in the English north are an economic question.

Such an analysis ignores the realities of the
political and economic power wielded by business and capital. Much of the
Scottish economy is owned and controlled at a UK level. But for the north of
England as much as Scotland, 'the UK' in this context is really a synonym for
the City of London. (See Richard Leonard in The Red Paper on Scotland 2014 .)

In this context, insisting that progress for
people in Scotland depends on independence is saying that those with similar
problems and outlook to our own must be written off as partners in building
something better. Despite problems on Clydeside and Merseyside having similar
causes and people feeling the same about them, the response, put bluntly, is a
statement that "Connection with you is holding us back".

Those who advocate such a course seldom show any
signs of having considered how Scotland’s retreating from tackling issues on a
UK basis, in pursuit of a (quite possibly illusory) sectional advantage, will
impact on those they wish to leave behind.

Some of course are explicit in advocating a
lifeboat scenario, saying in effect, "It’s all terribly sad for the
Scousers, but it’s nothing to do with us". This attitude suffices for
nationalists, who, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, don’t really care about
anyone’s country but their own. But for those who would claim to espouse any
sort of politics of the left - this is an inadequate response.

The question of whether or not Scotland leaving
the UK would be a progressive move depends of course on a range of factors far
wider than the convergence of opinion between Scotland and the north of
England. But that congruence of attitude is not trivial either.

Their issues of lack of accountability and
economic democracy, the consequences of financialisation and external ownership
are our issues too. They feel the same way about these things as we do. In such
circumstances, surely the burden of proof lies with those who would argue for
putting a political divide between us.

They should show, rather than simply
assert, how independence would improve, or at least do no harm, to our capacity
to jointly confront our common problems.

Friday, 29 November 2013

The Democratic Party moved way out to the Left, causing Southern whites, Cold War hawks, and pro-life Catholics to become Republicans. The rest is history. Isn't it? Er, no, actually, it isn't.

Southern white Democrats were by no means all segregationists and white supremacists, and those who were, as such, had no particular reason to become Republicans in or after the 1960s. It had never bothered them much before, and the Democrats had had a Civil Rights plank since as long ago as 1948, when Strom Thurmond had run against Truman as a Dixiecrat for precisely that reason.

Nevertheless, a higher proportion of Congressional Republicans than of Congressional Democrats had supported the Civil Rights Act, and anyone who voted for Nixon on the wrong side of the race issue must have been very naive indeed. In accordance with his record, Nixon in office vigorously pursued desegregation.

That section of opinion might have fallen out of the Democratic Party. But it has never been given the slightest cause to fall into the Republican Party. Say what you like about the Republicans, but they have never made the
tiniest effort to permit the return of Jim Crow, instead providing two
black Secretaries of State, which is two more than the Democrats have
ever managed.

For good, old-fashioned race-baiting, see instead Bobby Kennedy, Jimmy
Carter, and both of the Clintons well into the present century. Watch out for some more of it, if need be, in 2016.

There was no reason for diehard Cold Warriors to vote for Nixon rather than Humphrey, little reason for them to vote for Nixon rather than even McGovern (especially once he had balanced his ticket), and none whatever for them to vote for Ford rather than Carter. In the last case, quite the reverse, in fact; the same was true of those whose hawkishness was fiscal.

And there was, so to speak, no conceivable reason for pro-lifers, as such, to become Republicans rather than Democrats in or since the 1970s. Look at the judges who handed down Roe v. Wade. Harry Blackmun, the ruling's author, had been appointed by Nixon. Warren E. Burger by Nixon. William O. Douglas by Roosevelt. William J. Brennan by Eisenhower. Potter Stewart by Eisenhower. Thurgood Marshall by Johnson. And Lewis Powell by Nixon.

Even take out the two Democratic nominees, and that still gives a Republican majority in favour of what was in fact the overturning of the laws of all 50 states. In stark contrast, one of the dissenting judges, Byron White, had been appointed by a Democrat, Kennedy, while the other, William Rehnquist, had been appointed by a Republican, Nixon.

No one found that remotely odd at the time. No one who had bothered to pay attention would find it remotely odd from the perspective of the present day.

Nixon, by Executive Order, first legalised abortion at the federal taxpayer's expense. Whereas it was Carter who signed into law the Hyde Amendment banning it, which, although Henry Hyde himself was very conservative Republican, had been passed by a Congress both Houses of which had been under Democratic control at the time. That Amendment has never failed to receive its necessary annual renewal by both Houses.

In 1976, Ellen McCormack, a strongly pro-life Democrat, became the first woman Presidential candidate ever to qualify for matching federal funding and for Secret Service protection. If there is not one already, and I should be delighted to hear of it if there were, then someone needs to write a full biography of Ellen McCormack.

(Someone also needs to do a "Whatever happened to each of them and to what each of them stood for?" study of the eight candidates whose names were placed in nomination for Vice President at the 1972 Democratic Convention.)

Both of McGovern's running mates were pro-life. Whereas Nelson Rockefeller legalised abortion in New York. Ronald Reagan, who to this day retains a totally undeserved pro-life reputation, legalised abortion in California. Reagan, like Bush the Younger after him, proved to be worse than useless when it came to appointing pro-lifers to the Supreme Court, not even trying to do so on two of the three occasions when the opportunity presented itself to him.

Thus, in 1993, when Planned Parenthood sued the staunchly pro-life Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania, whose son is now a staunchly pro-life Democratic Senator for that state and made his case without difficulty from the platform of the 2008 Convention, over that state's very moderate legal restrictions on abortion, Planned Parenthood's case was upheld by a court every member of which had been appointed by a Republican President, including three by Reagan, apart from Byron White, who had dissented in 1973 and who was still dissenting 20 years later.

Eight Republicans out of nine judges. A third of the court appointed by Reagan. And before that court, Planned Parenthood beat Bob Casey, the Democrat who sought to uphold democracy in Pennsylvania. Of course. All round: of course.

RomneyCare provided and provides for state taxpayer-funded abortion from which,
through Bain Capital, Romney continues to derive an income. But ObamaCare
repeats and strengthens the 1977, Democratic-enacted ban on federal
taxpayer-funded abortion. It does so thanks to the efforts of Bart Stupak, a Democrat.

Or consider Joe Biden. He was already a United States Senator before the judgement
in Roe v. Wade. During 36 years in the Senate, he voted to overturn that
judgement by means of an amendment to the Constitution, he voted year
on year to renew the Hyde Amendment banning federal funding of abortion,
he voted against rape and incest exceptions until Hyde himself
was forced to accept them rather than see that renewal vetoed by Bill
Clinton (meaning that Biden has never actually cast a vote in favour of
them), he voted to ban partial-birth abortion, he voted to overturn both
of Clinton's vetoes of that ban, and he voted to recognise as
legally protected persons those infants who survived abortion. That is Biden's record, still unchanged in terms of votes cast.

But there is something beyond all of this. The Democrats were not wiped out in
the South by the Civil Rights Act or by anything else. The Democrats
were not wiped out in Middle America by Reagan's rhetorical Cold War
hardness, which bore no resemblance to his actions in office in his
second term, or by anything else. The Democrats, as the very fact of the
Caseys 20 years ago and today illustrates, were not wiped out in the
Northern Catholic citadels by abortion or by anything else.

The
Democratic Party controlled the House continuously from 1955 to 1995.
It controlled the Senate for most of that period, and it has done so for
much of the period since, including at the present time. It has won the
Presidency on four of the six occasions since Reagan retired, and the
popular vote on five of them.

Nixon Democrats, Reagan Democrats and, insofar as they existed, Bush Democrats were still Democrats, and they still are. There has never ceased to be a natural Democratic majority, and Southern white populists, who have adjusted perfectly well to the racially inclusive polity that many of them always foresaw and which some of them actively pioneered, have never ceased to be part of it, indeed a key part of it. The same is true, and if anything even truer, of Northern urban and now ex-urban Catholics.

Alas, those Cold War hawks were Democrats also mostly remained in the fold all the way through the Clinton years, doing immense damage to the party, to America and to the world along the way. They transferred to the GOP under Bush, and every step must be taken to ensure that they never come back in the guise in which they now present themselves, with their beating of the drum of war against all and sundry.

Just as the economic views of the paleoconservative movement that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union have no conceivable audience in the Republican Party but every hope of such among the Democrats, so the same is also true of the foreign policy views, and with both of the cultural views: the uncompromisingly pro-life, pro-family and patriotic case against global capitalism and its wars.

Those views, articulated or otherwise these days, define an indispensable section of a potentially permanent majority. On my knees, I beg the Democratic Party not to nominate Hillary Clinton.

Thursday, 28 November 2013

When it comes down to the one thing that matters, all that the much-hyped poll at South Thanet illustrates is the impending Labour recapture of a Southern seat lost to the Conservatives in 2010 (in this case) or in 2005.

Yes, that is going to be repeated across the South. As might be a large UKIP vote, but so what? Not one of those votes is going to elect an MP, and every single one of the Labour gains would have happened even if UKIP had never been founded.

Now, who and what are the Labour candidates? That is the real question.

As Michelle Obama tucks into the turkey and the pumpkin pie, does she think, "My ancestors came to this country for the freedom"?

But spare a thought for all those Americans who now have to work on Thanksgiving. On this among so very many other issues, Pat Buchanan should have been a Democrat. And the Democratic Party awaits its Pat Buchanan.

I have never taken an IQ test in my life. I question whether anyone
who sets any store by them is sufficiently intelligent to be allowed out
alone, if at all. For example, Boris Johnson.

The whole thing depends on “mental age”, whatever
that may be. The IQ of children in numerous countries has “improved”
dramatically over the years when IQ tests have been set, and therefore
taught to, in schools; indeed, this never fails to happen.

The
publications of Mensa are a particularly rich seam of amusement. “More
people than you might think are above average”? I’m guessing about half
of them. “One person in twenty is in the top five per cent”? You don’t
say! And so on.

But never try and tell the “I have a high IQ” lot
any of this.

You wouldn’t have to, and
indeed you never could, do anything to get a high IQ, even if such a
thing really existed. Having it would be no cause for congratulation,
never mind for self-congratulation or for the creation of an
international society for mutual congratulation.

The Americans have established a Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the fact
that the Pilgrim Fathers reached America. The English might very well establish
another Thanksgiving Day; to celebrate the happy fact that the Pilgrim Fathers
left England.

I know that this is still regarded as a historical heresy, by
those who have long ceased to worry about a religious heresy. For while these
persons still insist that the Pilgrim Fathers were champions of religious
liberty, nothing is more certain than the fact that an ordinary modern liberal,
sailing with them, would have found no liberty, and would have intensely disliked
all that he found of religion.

Even Thanksgiving Day itself, though it is now kept in a most kindly
and charming fashion by numbers of quite liberal and large-minded Americans,
was originally intended, I believe, as a sort of iconoclastic expedient for
destroying the celebration of Christmas. The Puritans everywhere had a curious
and rabid dislike of Christmas; which does not encourage me, for one, to
develop a special and spiritual fervour for Puritanism.

Oddly enough, however,
the Puritan tradition in America has often celebrated Thanksgiving Day by often
eliminating the Christmas Pudding, but preserving the Christmas Turkey. I do
not know why, unless the name of Turkey reminded them of the Prophet of Islam,
who was also the first Prophet of Prohibition.

The first two sentences make for
a good line, and one with various truths in it. But the link between
Thanksgiving and the Pilgrim Fathers is a piece of fiction. At root, it is a
lie. Arguably, it is a harmless lie. But it is undeniably a lie.

The celebration of the Puritans,
of all people, as heroes of the cause of freedom of conscience, of all things,
is about as ridiculous an event as it is possible to imagine. Come back on 30th
January for something at least in that vein. But the introduction of a late
November holiday, before which there is no Christmas shopping (or, indeed,
Christmas anything else), is an excellent idea.

That holiday should, of course,
be 30th November, Saint Andrew’s Day. Meaning, of course, that there would also
have to be public holidays on Saint George’s Day, Saint David’s Day and Saint
Patrick’s Day. And when are these islands lovelier than in the spring? The room
could easily be found by abolishing our pointless celebrations of the mere fact
that the banks are on holiday.

That said, the likes of Wal-Mart,
Sears and Toys R Us are now open for at least part of Thanksgiving Day. One may
only hope that no customers will present themselves, so that this monstrous
innovation will be discontinued.

Public holidays that exclude the public by
compelling lowly shop assistants, delivery drivers and such like to work are a
British thing, due to our unique penchant for holidays that commemorate
nothing. Not Patron Saints. Not great historical events. Nothing.

But then, Thanksgiving was
invented in no small measure to supplant Christmas, and the American Founding
Fathers were not Christians. They were Deists, and their position is
exemplified by The Jefferson Bible, from which he
excised all reference to Christ’s Divinity, Resurrection or miracles;
copies were presented to all incoming members of Congress until the
1950s.

However,
the phrase “the separation of Church and State” does not occur in the
Constitution. Rather, the First Amendment’s reference to religion was designed
to stop Congress, full of Deists as it was, from suppressing the Established
Churches of several states, although they all disestablished them of their own
volition later on precisely because they had fallen so completely under the
Founding Fathers’ influence.

The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, “of Peace and
Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of
Tripoli of Barbary”, was submitted to the Senate by President John Adams, was ratified
unanimously, and specified that “the Government of the United States of America
is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion”. Although he attended
Episcopalian services with his wife, George Washington did not receive
Communion.

It is sometimes suggested that
Thanksgiving was a continuation of Puritan and older Harvest Festivals in East
Anglia. It was not. Such things did and do go on in Europe, but certainly not
among the Puritans. Next, you will be telling me that they believed in religious
liberty. Whatever next! The historical facts are as set out here.

Thanksgiving
has been rather successful in supplanting Christmas, being the holiday for
which people make a point of returning to their family homes and so forth,
because the government of America started out as explicitly anti-Christian and
has been terribly effective in de-Christianising its country, despite the First
Amendment protections that every state then went on to relinquish voluntarily
because they had fallen under the spell of the Founding Fathers.

However, since 1776 predates
1789, the American Republic is not a product of the Revolution, but
nevertheless sits under a radically orthodox theological critique, most
obviously by reference to pre-Revolutionary traditions of Catholic and
Protestant republican thought, on the Catholic side perhaps Venetian, on the
Protestant side perhaps Dutch, and on both sides perhaps at cantonal level in
Switzerland, where it is possible that such thought might hold sway even now.

There
simply were Protestant Dutch Republics before the Revolution. There simply was
a Catholic Venetian Republic before the Revolution. There simply were, and
there simply are, Protestant and Catholic cantons in Switzerland, predating the
Revolution.

The literature must be there, for those who can read the languages
sufficiently well. Furthermore, there is no shortage of Americans whose
ancestors came from the Netherlands or from Italy, and there may well be many
who assume from their surnames that their bloodline is German or Italian (or
possibly French) when in fact it is Swiss.

It is time for a few of them to go
looking for these things, with a view to applying them as the radically orthodox
theological critique of that pre-Revolutionary creation, the American Republic.

Within that wider context, far
more Jacobites went into exile from these Islands than Huguenots sought refuge
here. The Jacobites founded the Russian Navy of Peter the Great. They
maintained a network of merchants in the ports circling the Continent. Their
banking dynasties had branches in several great European cities. They
introduced much new science and technology to their host countries. They
dominated the Swedish East India and Madagascar Companies. They fought with the
French in India.

And very many of them ended up either in the West Indies or in
North America. New York seems the most obvious
place to look for them, being named after its initial proprietor as a colony, the
future James VII and II.

However, there were many Jacobite Congregationalists,
such as Edward Roberts, the exiled James’s emissary to the anti-Williamite
Dutch republics, and Edward Nosworthy, a gentleman of his Privy Council both
before and after 1688.

There was that Catholic enclave, Maryland. And there was
Pennsylvania: almost, if almost, all of the Quakers were at least initially
Jacobites, and William Penn himself was arrested for Jacobitism four times
between 1689 and 1691.

Many Baptists were also
Jacobites, and the name, episcopal succession and several other features of the
American Episcopal Church derive, not from the Church of England, but from the
staunchly Jacobite Episcopal Church in Scotland, which provided the American
Colonies with a bishop, Samuel Seabury, in defiance of the Church of England
and of the Hanoverian monarchy to which it was attached.

Early Methodists were
regularly accused of Jacobitism. John Wesley himself had been a High Church
missionary in America, and Methodism was initially an outgrowth of
pre-Tractarian, often at least sentimentally Jacobite, High Churchmanship.

Very
many people conformed to the Established Church but either refused to take the
Oath or declared that they would so refuse if called upon to take it. With its
anti-Calvinist soteriology, it high sacramentalism and Eucharistic theology,
and its hymnody based on the liturgical year, early Methodism appealed to them.

So the redemption of the American
republican experiment, of which Thanksgiving is one of the great popular
expressions, is clearly possible. But only by looking beyond the Founding
Fathers and by submitting them, whatever the consequences, to what lies in that
Great Beyond.

Wednesday, 27 November 2013

For Labour to support Nigel Mills's amendment would be to do nothing more than support the continuation of the arrangements that Labour had put and left in place. It would be the most consistent thing in the world, and either victory or defeat for the Coalition against such a vote would be political gold for Labour.

Mills stands no chance of holding in 2015 the Amber Valley seat that he won in 2010. As with his vote on Syria, he has clearly decided to enjoy the five-year interlude when he was an MP, between the ages of 36 and 41 so as to allow plenty of time for other things. Good luck to him, say I.

But a population, as much the Catholic as the ancestrally Protestant half of it, which is determined not to reproduce itself can only expect to be replaced. If that population really is so concerned about Islamic conquest, then there is no one to whom it could more dearly wish to hand over these Islands than the Eastern Europeans. Equalled only by the Christians of West Africa and of the belt across the horizontal middle of that continent.

Byzantium: A Tale of Three Cities begins at 9pm on BBC Four next Thursday, 5th December. Ed West and I have been tweeting in anticipation, although of course it must have been planned for years and it has very visibly taken years to make.

But, while one does not wish to be churlish, the BBC rightly does plenty on Classical Antiquity, and it recently concluded a three-part terrestrial television series on and called The Ottomans. That is two of the three cities already taken care of.

This series is welcome. It will doubtless be excellent as a study of its subject. But that subject, and its title, ought to have been The Byzantines.

"Now, like these Soviet tanks, the Iron Lady was unceremoniously decommissioned."

That is a good line.

Although not as good a line as the little girl's, "Mrs Thatcher, in the event of a nuclear war, where will you be?" Or Thatcher's own, to some pop star or what have you who had arrived at Number 10 wearing a T-shirt about Pershing, "We have no Pershing here, dear. They are all Cruise here, dear." She was her own tribute act, was that Thatcher. She was a very good one, too.

And Dominic Sandbrook's Strange Days: Cold War Britain has been a good series, which concluded with the observation that the Cold War had been won with consumerism and credit. That turbo-capitalism, the term used by Sandbrook, had been supposed to bring use everlasting prosperity. But they did not, and we ought to have used our victory more wisely.

Sandbrook's Daily Mail colleague, Andrew Alexander, is getting on a bit now. But it as only last year that he published America and the Imperialism of Ignorance, a devastating critique of the Cold War and its aftermath from an utterly uncompromising right-wing perspective. A series based on that is long overdue.

Aravindan Balakrishnan, 73, and his 67-year-old
wife, Chanda – arrested last week on suspicion of holding
three women as slaves in a flat for 30 years – were leaders of a tiny sect
of 25 members known as the Workers' Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong
Thought, invisible to the left at large.

This sect had split from its father
organisation, the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist), which itself
had less than a hundred followers. The Maoists' antics were rivalled by a
number of Trotskyist sects, smaller and larger, whose implosion often involved
the mistreatment of women, and the story is by no means over.

The Balakrishnans' Brixton commune, it is now
alleged, kept three women as virtual prisoners against their will. But it
prospered. Membership declined, but property increased. The Balakrishnans
pre-empted China's turn to capitalism – according to some reports they had
interests in 13 properties, three more than their total membership at the time.

What was the attraction of Maoism? The figure of
Mao and the revolution loomed large, but the outpourings from these groups did
not suggest a close reading of On Contradiction
or other texts by Mao that might have stimulated the brain cells.

Instead they
became fantasy outfits, each with its own homegrown Mao playing on the genuine
desire for change that dominated the 1967-77 decade.

As a political current, Maoism was always weak in
Britain, confined largely to students from Asia, Africa and Latin America. This
was not the case in other parts of Europe. At its peak, German Maoism had more
than 10,000 members, and the combined circulation of its press was 100,000.

After the great disillusionment – as the Chinese-US alliance of the mid-70s was
termed – many of them privatised, and thousands joined the Greens, Jürgen
Trittin becoming a staunch pro-Nato member of Gerhard Schröder's cabinet.

Scandinavia was awash with Maoism in the 70s.
Sweden had Maoist groups with a combined membership and periphery of several
thousand members but it was Norway where Maoism became a genuine popular force
and hegemonic in the culture.

The daily paper Klassekampen still exists, now as
an independent daily with a very fine crop of gifted journalists (mainly women)
and a growing circulation. October is a leading fiction publishing house and
May was a successful record company.

Per Petterson, one of the country's most
popular novelists, describes in a recent book how, when Mao died, 100,000
people in a population of five million marched with torches to a surprised
Chinese embassy to offer collective condolences. All this is a far cry from the
cult sect now being excavated in Brixton.

What always struck me even then as slightly odd
was that, regardless of the political complexion of a sect, the behavioural patterns
of its leaders were not so different.

Even those most critical of Stalinist
style and methods tended to reproduce the model of a one-party state within
their own ranks, with dissent limited to certain periods and an embryonic
bureaucracy in charge of a tiny organisation. It was in western Europe, not
under Latin American or Asian military dictatorships, that clandestinity and
iron discipline were felt to be necessary.

Young women and men who joined the far-left
groups did so for the best of reasons. They wanted to change the world. Many
fought against the stifling atmosphere in many groups. Women organised caucuses
to monitor male chauvinism inside the groups and challenged patriarchal
practices.

Pity that not all the lessons were learned. Easy now to forget that
many who fought within and led the women's and gay liberation movements – in
Europe and elsewhere – had received their political education inside the ranks
of the combined far left, warts and all.

I can still recall a South American feminist calmly
informing a large gathering of revolutionaries in the 70s that advances were
being made against machismo. "Only last year," she declared, "my
husband, who is sitting on the platform, locked me in the house on 8 March so I
couldn't join the International Women's Day demonstration." The husband
hid his face in shame.

Now the 70s really does seem another country. The
thunder of money has drowned much that was and is of value. The campaign to
demonise trade unions – indeed, any form of non-mainstream political activism
or dissent – continues apace, despite the fact that the left has never been
weaker. A sign, perhaps, that the votaries of the free market remain fearful of
any challenges from below.

Oh, and José Manuel Barroso, the fiercely neoliberal and neoconservative Prime Minister of Portugal who has gone on to be President of the European Commission, was a 1970s Maoist. Of course.

Hanukkah is a strange
one. After the emergence of Judaism, set out below, Hanukkah was historically a
very minor festival until almost into living memory, and in much of the Jewish
world it still is.

But it does provide an opportunity to pre-empt this year’s
round of lazy claims that Christmas is a taking over of some pagan winter
festival. There is of course a universal need for winter festivals. But the
dating of Christmas derives from Hanukkah, not from the pagan Saturnalia or
anything else.

No British or Irish
Christmas custom derives from paganism. There is little, if any, fokloric pagan
continuation in these islands, and little, if anything, is known about
pre-Christian religion here.

Most, if not all, allegations to the contrary
derive from Protestant polemic against practices originating in the Middle
Ages, and usually the Late Middle Ages at that. The modern religion known as
Paganism is an invention from scratch, the very earliest roots of which are in the
late nineteenth century.

Furthermore, the dating
of Christmas from that of Hanukkah raises serious questions for Protestants,
who mistakenly exclude the two Books of Maccabees from the Canon because, along
with various other works, they were allegedly not considered canonical at the
time of Jesus and the Apostles.

In fact, the rabbis only excluded those books
specifically because they were likely to lead people into Christianity, and
they are repeatedly quoted or cited in the New Testament, as they were by
Jewish writers up to their rabbinical exclusion.

Even thereafter, a point is
made by the continued celebration of Hanukkah, a celebration thanks to books to
which Jews only really had access because Christians had preserved them, since
the rabbis wanted them destroyed.

Indeed, far from being
the mother-religion that it is often assumed to be, a very great deal of
Judaism is actually a reaction against Christianity, although this is by no
means the entirety of the relationship, with key aspects of kabbalah actually
deriving from Christianity, with numerous other examples set out in Rabbi
Michael Hilton’s The Christian Effect on Jewish Life (London: SCM Press,
1994), and so on.

Hanukkah bushes, and the giving and receiving of presents at
Hanukkah, stand in a tradition of two-way interaction both as old as
Christianity and about as old as anything that could reasonably be described as
Judaism. As Rabbi Hilton puts it, “it is hardly surprising that Jewish communities
living for centuries in Christian society should be influenced by the
surrounding culture.”

There are many, many,
many other examples that could be cited. These range from the Medieval adoption
for Jewish funeral use of the Psalm numbered 23 in Jewish and Protestant
editions, to the new centrality within Judaism that the rise of Christianity
gave to Messianic expectations (the Sadducees, for example, had not believed in
the Messiah at all) or to the purification of women after childbirth, to the
identification in later parts of the Zohar of four senses of Scripture
technically different from but effectively very similar to those of
Catholicism, to Medieval rabbis’ explicit and unembarrassed use of Christian
stories in their sermons.

Many a midrash – such as “to you the Sabbath is
handed over, but you are not handed over to the Sabbath” – is easily late
enough to be an example of the direct influence of Christianity, yet Jewish and
Christian scholars alike tend to announce an unidentified common, usually
Pharisaic, root, although they rarely go off on any wild goose chase to find
that root. I think that we all know why not.

But the real point is
something far deeper, arising from the definition of the Jewish Canon in
explicitly anti-Christian terms, and from the anti-Christian polemic in the
Talmud.

Judaism hardly uses the Hebrew Bible directly rather than its own,
defining and anti-Christian, commentaries on it and on each other. Jews
doubting this should ask themselves when they last heard of an animal sacrifice,
or which of their relatives is a polygamist. Judaism, I say again, is not some
sort of mother-religion.

Rather, I say again that it is a reaction against
Christianity, specifically, like Islam, a Semitic reaction against the
recapitulation in Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel,
Hellenism and the Roman Empire; there are also, of course, culturally European
reactions against that recapitulation by reference to Classical sources, as
there always have been, although they are increasingly allied to Islam.

Thus constructed,
Judaism became, and remains, an organising principle, again like
Classically-based reactions, for all sorts of people discontented for whatever
reason by the rise of Christianity in general and the Christianisation of the
Roman Empire in particular, including all the historical consequences of that
up to the present day, without any realistic suggestion of a common ethnic
background.

Above all, Judaism’s unresolved Messianic hope and expectation has
issued in all sorts of earthly utopianisms: Freudian, Marxist (and then
Trotskyist, and then Shachtmanite), monetarist, Zionist, Straussian,
neoconservative by reference to all of these, and so forth.

They are all
expressions of Judaism’s repudiation of Original Sin, Christianity’s great
bulwark against the rationally and empirically falsifiable notions of
inevitable historical progress and of the perfectibility of human nature in
this life alone and by human efforts alone.

It is Christianity that
refers constantly to the Biblical text. It is Christianity in general, and
Catholicism in particular, that has a Temple, Jesus Christ, Who prophesied both
the destruction of the Temple and its replacement in His own Person.

It is
Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that has a Priesthood.
It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, that has a
Sacrifice, the Mass. It is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in
particular, that is the religion of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Including the two
Books of Maccabees, the origin of Hanukkah, the true form of which, as of so
much else, is Christmas.

In an interesting piece
in The Atlantic, Megan
Garber discusses the
new plan to have the U.S. Post Office deliver Amazon packages on
Sundays. Ms. Garber also describes how an alliance of churches and labor unions
ended Sunday delivery in 1912. While many people probably don't care much about
this development, I find it rather disturbing.

Christian religious
observance is being undermined by commercialism. Taking just one example, more
people are working
on Christmas than ever before. While I understand the need for health and
emergency staff to work on holidays (of course, with extra compensation), I am
shocked by how many non-essential services such as restaurants and stores
are open during the holidays. And yes, it is often the case that those who must
work on the holidays are in low-paying service jobs.

The decline in the
observance of holidays as days of rest from paid labor is part of capitalism's
tendency to subject all of human life to economic calculation and the demands
of capital. When Christianity was the dominant cultural force in Europe during
the Middle Ages, peasants and artisans actually had ample holiday time.Workers sometimes
had as much as one-third
of the year off. Medieval farmers and artisans had more
vacation time than their modern counterparts.

Despite predictions
that leisure time would increase in advanced societies, Americans and Western
Europeans are seeing their leisure time scaled back under neoliberalism. The
eight-hour workday and other victories won by the labor movement are being
demolished while workers are harangued by capitalists and their lackeys in the
government and media about the need to stay competitive in the global
economy.

"The one
endeavor of capitalism has been to emancipate itself from ideas, or
institutions based upon ideas, that impeded the economic rationalization of
life." (Fanfani 1934: 92).

Interestingly, Fanfani
goes on to described the Soviet Union as the final realization of
capitalist civilization, writing:

"It may seem a
paradox, but the most technically perfect economic realization of capitalistic
civilization is the Soviet system, in which all private and public efforts have
only one end: the economic rationalization of the whole of life, to the point
of abolishing private property and the family and of attempting the destruction
of all religious ideals that might threaten such materialistic rationalization.
Russia has carried the rationalizing experiment of capitalism to its logical
conclusion." (Fanfani 1934: 92).

In opposition to both
capitalism and communism, Fanfani presents the Church as the entity that has,
throughout history, sought to protect society from domination by purely
economic forces.

"In the Middle
Ages, by supporting the intervention of public bodies in economic life as a
check to individual activity and to defend the interests of society as a whole;
in our own time, by calling for State intervention for the same reasons,
the Church has remained faithful to her anti-capitalistic ethics. Both during
the predominance of the medieval guild system, and during that of capitalism,
the Church, and those Catholics that listened to her voice, set or sought to
set bounds not lawfully to be overstepped to the course of economic life — even
at the cost of a sacrifice of mechanical and technical progress, which in the
Catholic conception of society, has never been identical with civilization."(Fanfani
1934: 126).

Thus, we can see that
sacrificing the leisure time of workers to the demands of the capitalist market
is antithetical to the Catholic conception of society, which places certain
non-economic values above purely economic ones, even if it may reduce
competitiveness or technical progress or some other material aspect of life.
From a Catholic perspective, those who insist on market fundamentalism are
making the same mistake as followers of Marxist communism. This
mistake is the reduction of all politics, and indeed all of human life, to
economics.

Therefore, we should
not be surprised when Pope Francis discusses the need for workers to have plenty
of leisure time, a sentiment also shared by his immediate
predecessor. It is not a coincidence that the decline of Christian influence
in the West has led to an erosion of working conditions for Western workers.
Without a strong, countervailing philosophical force to stand in its way,
capital can simply run over whatever feeble opposition secularists manage
to put up. By separating Christianity and economics, we have allowed ourselves
to be ruled by the high priests of Mammon.

Nothing has changed with the publication
of the Scottish nationalists' white paper. Alex Salmond still bases his argument to break up the
United Kingdom on mere assertions and uncosted promises. He has ducked the
difficult questions on currency, pensions and our membership of the European
Union.

This white paper was also an attempt at a
manifesto funded from the public purse. The authors promised more childcare
after independence. They failed to mention that they have the power to do this
now. They promised to abolish the bedroom tax. They failed to mention that
their own advisers have told them that they couldn't do so for some
years because of the complexity of the benefits system.

They promised they would answer all the questions
anyone could possibly have. Their aim is to point to this white paper
and refuse to answer any further questions for the next 10 months. It
won't wash.

We need the facts, but all we got
was a political wishlist. We still don't know what currency Scotland
would use if we vote to go it alone. The nationalists want a currency
union with the rest of the UK but their own civil servants have admitted
that they can't guarantee that. The problem is that the rest of the UK
would have to agree to this – it looks increasingly like a non-starter. Even
some nationalists see that a currency union would be a straitjacket, not
independence.

So what's plan B? Using sterling in the same way
that Panama uses the American dollar? Or is it a new currency? Or would we be
forced to join the euro? We don't know who would set our mortgage rates. We
don't know by how much taxes would have to go up. We don't know how secure our
pensions and benefits would be in an independent Scotland.

Alex Salmond claims that we will leave the UK and
be automatically waved into the European Union without any problem. The
issue here is that leading figures – including the president of the European
commission, José Manuel Barroso, has made it clear that Scotland would be a new
applicant nation and would have to negotiate its way in.

No one thinks that an
independent Scotland wouldn't eventually get into the European Union, but
we don't know how long it would take and, crucially, we don't know what terms
and conditions would be placed on our entry.

Would Scotland have to give a commitment to
join the euro? Would we have to sign up to the open-borders Schengen agreement?
We simply don't know. But still Salmond asserts that everything will be fine.
In doing this, the Scottish National party leader exposes a
fundamental flaw in the nationalist case.

Rather than facing up to
the challenges that leaving the UK poses for Scotland, he simply brushes
criticism aside. Whether it's confronting the cost of an ageing population or
accepting that North Sea oil revenues will decline, he simply ignores the
consequences.

Like everyone else who lives in Scotland, I care
deeply about the future of my country. I believe that the case for us staying
in the United Kingdom is a strong one. However, I will never shy away from
questioning a proposal from our government that will fundamentally change our
lives for ever.

We have the best of both worlds right now in
Scotland. We have a parliament in Edinburgh that allows us to do things
our way and we have the security of being part of the bigger UK. I don't
see why we should trade that in for a one-way ticket to a deeply uncertain
destination.

Kevin Meagher, with whom I was greatly impressed at the Blue Labour conference this year, writes:

If you control language then you control the
debate. That is what the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci claimed in
his theory of “passive revolution”, which focused on shaping attitudes in order
to secure changes in a society’s culture.

The methods may seem opaque now, but his
successors are those who seek to reduce Christianity’s special place in society
by anonymising religious denominations and removing any sense of entitlement,
either for Catholics, Anglicans or, more broadly, for this country’s Christian
heritage.

This is the product of a pseudo-liberal
groupthink that remains inherently hostile to the religious having any role in
public affairs at all. It therefore seeks to “manage” religions (or, as they
are termed these days, “faith communities”), lumping Catholicism in with small
groups like Scientology and the Bahá’í.

We find ourselves corralled together as
“people of faith” in order to be controlled, minimised and, all too often,
demonised. This all stems from a mindset where religion is seen to be an
inherently regressive force, something that once enjoyed privileges and from
whose clutches society should be escaping.

Something that’s had too much power and now needs
firmly putting in its place. In fact, so pervasive is this belief that no less
a figure than Barack Obama spouts it. Speaking in Northern Ireland while he was
attending the G8 earlier this year, Obama said: “If towns remain divided – if
Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs – if we
can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear and resentment are allowed to
harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.”

At a stroke, his
infuriating remarks reduced a complex ethno-national conflict to the fault of
Catholic schools and the insulting, injurious and entirely spurious belief they
are somehow fermenting intolerance and hatred.

Yet whatever disdain liberals reserve for the
role of Catholic education now pales against the suspicion they direct towards
the steady trickle of Islamic schools that are beginning to open up. Last month
the Al-Madinah free school in Derby was judged by schools regulator Ofsted to
be inadequate, with the threat that it would be closed unless urgent measures
were taken to rectify its poor performance, which included discrimination
against girl pupils and non-Muslims.

There will have been a collective
muttering of “I told you so” among the panjandrums of the liberal educational
elite, who see a growth in Muslim schools as a nightmare scenario, a de facto
licence to introduce gender discrimination into the classroom, with a
curriculum offering little more than “madrassas on the rates”.

Yet, rather than deal with the problem at hand,
describing the Al-Madinah free school as a “faith school” is a way of not
calling it a “Muslim school”. This way, Islamic schools can be challenged, but
couched as a collective punishment for the God botherers.

This is why “faith”
is a linguistic holding pen for Catholics, a way of marginalising the role of
religion in society, but also a means for Catholics and other Christians to
cross-subsidise Islam. This is the product of a post-9/11 obsession in trying
to bring Islam into the mainstream to avert any accusation that there is a
“clash of civilisations” with western Christian mores. The solution to reducing
Islam’s “otherness” has been to place Muslims firmly together with all the
other “people of faith”.

In minimising religion in this way, the aim is to
reduce it to a solely private matter. It cannot provide moral leadership in a
pluralist society. It must not provide adoption agency services that do not
abide by strictures about gay relationships. And it certainly should not be
involved in “indoctrinating” children with religion in school.

As Catholics, it is time we reasserted our
separateness. We should stop allowing ourselves to be hemmed in by those who
seek to manage and marginalise us. We should lead a counter-Gramscian cultural
shift towards making the expression of religious conviction in the public
sphere seem normal again. This should start by eschewing terms like “faith
school” and “faith community”. It should also mean proudly and visibly
proclaiming Catholic schools to be just that.

After all, there are no problems with Christian
church schools. They offer the state sector – as they always have done – a
bedrock of consistently superb educational establishments, basing access not on
wealth but simply on religious adherence.

Measured either by parental consent or
examination results, church schools form the building blocks of our state
education system. So those liberals who dislike them should be forced to come
clean about what they really mean.

Of course, what they really want is no more
Al-Madinahs. They want to strangle off the very concept of Muslim schools,
which they believe will usher in retrograde practices (with some evidence, it
has to be said). But their liberalism is torn between protecting the rights of
a religious and ethnic minority and upholding universal rights for girls.
That’s their headache.

It’s time we Christians stopped allowing
ourselves and our institutions to be framed as a problem simply because
atheistic liberal opinion is too weak, or too conflicted, to face up to and
deal with Islam’s less attractive cultural practices.

Of course, the parents at the Al-Madinah free
school are simply exercising the same parental choice we enjoy in establishing
a school that gives expression to the tenets of their religion. But if they see
the value of boys and girls differently, the state, in the guise of Ofsted’s
inspectors, is entitled to come down hard on their errant practices. But that
is their battle to fight, not ours.

We Catholics should defend our right to religious
freedom and parental choice, defending the record of Catholic schools in
providing first-rate comprehensive education. We should throw off the shackles
that have us bound up as a faith group in order to be classified and
marginalised by atheistic pseudo-liberals.

We should wrest control the debate
by insisting on our own language to define ourselves. We can start that process
by losing “faith”.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of the
website Labour Uncut and a former special adviser in the last Labour government.

Supporters of global capitalism and of American hegemony (including "the Anglosphere") who imagine that they are somehow opponents of European federalism, and supporters of European federalism who imagine that they are somehow opponents of global capitalism and of American hegemony, are struck dumb by the situation in Ukraine.

Not so, those of us who have the first clue what is going on in the world, and who therefore understand and celebrate the proper role of Russia against all of those evils. One such understanding person is here. We know which side we are on. And we have always known it.

The late 1960s were heady times. In China, the
Cultural Revolution was in progress. And in Calcutta, in eastern India,
restless and angry youths were hurling crude bombs at police vans.

It was not far from there that a Maoist rebellion
broke out in 1967, which China termed as “a peal of spring thunder”. India had
gained independence 20 years ago. But nothing had changed for its poor. Many
young men and women rose to the call of revolution, drawing inspiration from
Maoist ideology. Many of them came from middle-class families.

One such young man returned to India from London,
without completing a course in accountancy. He returned wearing an overcoat
that had 24 secret pockets, all stuffed with Maoist literature. Kobad Ghandy
came from a wealthy family in Bombay – his father was the finance director of
Glaxo pharmaceuticals.

Kobad had been radicalised in the UK and would
become the leading light of the Maoist movement in India, only arrested by the
police in 2009. Towards the end of 1969 a young British teacher, Mary Tyler,
also came to India along with her Indian husband Amalendu Sen. They joined a
Maoist group active on the Bengal-Bihar border in eastern India. But shortly afterwards,
they were arrested by the police.

Mary spent five years in an Indian jail.
Defending the actions of her rebel husband she writes: “Amalendu’s crime … is
the crime of all those who cannot remain unmoved and inactive in an India …
where justice is the exception and injustice the rule.”

The Maoism of Comrade Bala had been a historical
footnote until now. But it is that sense of injustice that is still attracting
thousands of people – mostly tribal people known as the Adivasis – to the
Maoist movement. The Maoists are active in central and eastern India areas left
ungoverned for decades. It is this void that the Maoists have filled.

But revolution remains a utopia. The Adivasis are
now caught in a vicious war between the Maoists and the state. They continue to
suffer.

Much though I like and respect Douglas Murray [bloody hell, why?], I
reckon he and other Ayatollohaphobes are wrong about the deal struck with
Iran.

If Iran’s willingness to negotiate was evidence that sanctions were
working, rather than a sudden flowering of the ‘let us all now be frenz’ spirit
in Tehran – then the sanctions have surely done their job. That was the point
of them.

This seems to me so straightforward as to be almost tautological.
There are risks with any deal, risks that the mullahs may indeed renege. But it
is hard to argue on a basis of fact, rather than prejudice, even if you are
living in Tel Aviv, that the world is not a slightly safer place right now as a
consequence of the deal. Even if the hapless Cathy Ashton was a party to it.

On a side issue, but of relevance: there is not a
country in the world – with the possible exception of Egypt – which has more
cause to be mistrustful of the UK and USA than does Iran. Our involvement,
especially, in that country has been unspeakably malign; greedy, vicious,
tyrannical.

Regardless or not of whether the Iranians are ‘genuine’ in their
apparent wish for a peaceful settlement, we should count our blessings that it
is possible to achieve some sort of accord.

On the one hand the US has tacitly acknowledged
the Iranian right to enrich uranium. In return the Iranians have allowed the
IAEA virtually unlimited access, thus ensuring that no nuclear material can be
diverted for military purposes.

It is a development that should be welcomed by
all sensible people.

But let’s not forget that the deal that was
agreed yesterday is in fundamentals identical to the one offered by the
Iranians during the last set of negotiations in 2005.

President Rouhani was then the chief Iranian
negotiator and John Sawers (now head of MI6) was the chief British negotiator.
At a meeting on 23rd March 2005 at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, Mohammed Zarif,
now Iranian foreign minister, offered to put limits on Iranian enrichment,
renounce nuclear weapons and allow round-the-clock IAEA inspection at its
enrichment plants in return for Iranian development of centrifuge enrichment
technology.

It was an incredibly generous offer. But when
Sawers took it back to London it was blocked by Tony Blair, acting on the
orders of George W Bush. At that time, the US wouldn’t tolerate the operation
of even one centrifuge in Iran. Now, when around 19,000 centrifuges have been
installed, the US has bowed to the inevitable.

In other words, all the pain and agony of the
last eight years could have been avoided if only the Iranian offer had not been
blocked by Britain and the United States.

Nothing has changed as a result of today’s White
Paper. There is nothing that we found out today that we didn’t already know.
Yesterday Alex Salmond’s case for breaking up the UK was based on assertions.
Today it is still based on assertions.

The simple fact is that the nationalists have
ducked the opportunity to answer any of the big questions about our country’s
future. They promised us facts. What they have given us is a wish list with no
prices attached.

If this White Paper was going to be credible, it
had to address the fundamental issues that people are concerned about. They
didn’t.

We still don’t know what currency we use if we vote to go it alone. We
don’t know who would set our mortgage rates. We don’t know by how much taxes
would have to go up. We don’t know how secure our pensions and benefits would
be in an independent Scotland.

What we heard today were endless assertions from
Alex Salmond that if we vote for independence then he would get us everything
we want from every negotiation he entered into. Every country, every
organisation and every institution would simply roll over and accede to
Salmond’s demands. It is nonsense.

They told us today that childcare was at the
heart of their plans. However, they do not need independence to change
childcare in Scotland. When pressed on this policy at their launch, the Deputy
First Minister said something utterly astonishing.

She said that the Scottish
Government did not want to improve childcare now, that they didn’t want women
to be able to go back to work now, because it would mean that the tax they
would then pay would go to the UK Treasury.

This beggars belief. The Treasury is our
treasury. It is not a body in some foreign country. The money that it raises is
spent right across the entire United Kingdom. Public spending in Scotland is
over £1200 per year higher than it is in the rest of the UK.

With so much uncertainty and unanswered questions
about the cost of independence, leaving the UK would be a huge leap in the dark
– especially when we know that devolution works for Scotland.

We can have the
best of both worlds – a strong Scottish Parliament with the strength and
opportunity of being part of a bigger United Kingdom.

We can celebrate diplomacy trouncing militarism,
agreement reached around a table in Geneva instead of down a missile silo. Defusing a potential apocalypse is a golden
opportunity to recast ­relations in the Middle East.

The wings of hawks, including ­Israel’s
nuclear-armed leader Benjamin Netanyahu, are clipped. His threats of armed strikes – opposed by Israeli
intelligence chiefs – ring hollow when the US, Iran’s Great Satan, is a
signatory. The Arab Spring swiftly turned to winter but it
would be irresponsible to squander the possibilities opened by the Persian
Pact.

First we must acknowledge the hard lessons of
recent history. The Iran deal is another nail in the coffin of
the invasion of Iraq, fresh evidence there is an alternative to bloody and
illegal wars. It’s a reminder of the futility of occupying
Afghanistan, 27 Commons motions required to list all 446 dead British soldiers. And it vindicates public and political opposition
in the summer to attacking Syria.

Foreign Secretary William Hague deserves credit
for his role in securing Iran’s promise not to pursue a Weapon of Mass
Destruction. Prime Minister David Cameron will claim a chunk
of the credit, success having many parents. Yet there would’ve been no deal had Cameron and
Hague won August’s vote to attack President Assad’s regime in Syria. Britain
would’ve been sucked into a sectarian civil war, serving as al-Qaeda’s air
force.

Iran along with Russia, another player in
yesterday’s deal, would be fighting Britain, America and France in Syria
instead of negotiating. The unlikely hero of the deal is Labour
leader Ed Miliband. Rebellious MPs and the prospect of a minibus full
of shadow front bench resignations strengthened his resolve. But the opposition leader played an indirect,
though crucial, role on Iran by stopping US President Barack Obama pressing the
button to bomb Syria. This is history as an unintended consequence.

And while we’re handing out bouquets, Euro Brit
Catherine Ashton enjoys the last laugh over her ­chauvinist detractors. The EU’s top diplomat is another who should take
a bow, Iran the perfect riposte from a “Lady Qui?” who will let the Iran
breakthrough do her talking.

What’s happening in Iran improves the prospects
of a settlement in Syria ahead of talks. Perhaps too the previously intractable
Israel-Palestine conflict. In a few months or years we will look back on
another false dawn if the nuke deal explodes.

Iran, it is worth remembering,
denied intending to develop a bomb and Glasgow-educated President Hassan
Rouhani isn’t instinctively hostile to Britain and other western powers. He’s more interested in lifting crippling
economic sanctions than joining Israel, Britain and others in the nuclear club.

So for now we can hope the Iran deal signals
peace is the future, and war is past.

The Scottish government’s long awaited white
paper is a piece of fantasy economics. More spending and lower taxes:
everybody wins. Alex Salmond’s argument today is that Scottish voters can have
it all. All gain and no pain.

Nowhere is this truer than on welfare where there
is a long list of commitments to repeal unpopular policies and offer new
goodies. Other than a (contentious) assertion that the tax base north of the
border is stronger than in the rest of the UK, it is unclear how any of this
can be paid for.

On pensions, the SNP want to make the state
pension more generous, increase it faster and delay the rise in the age at
which people can claim it. This is for a Scottish population that is ageing
more quickly than the rest of the UK.

It is as if Scotland is immune from the
affordability pressure on pension provision across the developed world. And
that’s before the administration question is considered. The proposal today is
for two quite distinct state pension systems across the UK to be run through
one system. Is anyone clear whether this is feasible?

On working age welfare, the SNP are calling for a
halt to reform. Plans to implement Universal Credit and replace Disability
Living Allowance would be abandoned under an independent Scotland.

There are
problems with both these measures, but it is more than a little worrying that
the Scottish government is so vague about what would come in their place. These
are major benefits affecting hundreds of thousands of Scots, many of whom
depend on these payments for their day to day living.

One of the headline grabbing aspects of today’s
announcement is on childcare, where the Scottish government rightly advances an
argument for following a Nordic path of extending provision for parents with
young children.

The first obvious point to note in response is that childcare
is already a devolved issue, so there is no need for independence for such important
progress to be made. The trickier problem for the SNP is, again, how the extra
provision would be paid for.

There would be fiscal gains if the maternal
employment rate increased, which an independent Scotland could recoup, but in
every country where a similar shift has taken place, a sizable upfront
investment has been needed to get things going.

What the white paper fails to mention is that
Scotland stands a much better chance of meeting the future costs of welfare if
it remains part of the UK social union. By coming together the nations of the
UK are able to pool financial resources and share risks across a large and
resilient political community.

This matters because economic shocks tend to be
asymmetric, affecting individuals and places in different ways and at different
times. Equally different parts of the country vary demographically, with some
parts like Scotland today ageing more quickly than others, creating different
pressures over time for public services.

The social union therefore ensures
that if one part of the UK endures a period of economic or social hardship, it
can be supported both by itself and by the other parts.

This can be seen operating in both directions, in
Scotland’s history. Scotland today benefits from relatively high levels of
welfare spending from the UK pool to allow it to meet the pressures it faces
(today Scots benefit from financial transfers and additional spending per-head
on welfare overall – £3,255 per head in 2011/12, nearly 2% higher per head than
the UK average of £3,200).

But, similarly, oil revenues from what would be
Scottish waters contributed very substantially to that UK pool during the
1980s.

A commitment to the UK social union is not
anathema to further devolution. There is a strong case for strengthening the
powers of the Scottish parliament in respect of welfare (an issue IPPR
will cover in its devomore programme).

Housing benefit could, for
instance, be devolved to allow Holyrood to respond to the housing supply
shortage by switching spending from benefits to bricks. And, once devolved,
there would be nothing to stop the Scottish government ridding itself of the
bedroom tax.

Independence, however, would permanently break
the UK’s social union weakening the ability of Scotland to cope with the fiscal
and demographic pressures welfare states the world over face.